01
Variable
Panel size
How many questions we sample nightly. Two hundred is a starting panel; a full category is two thousand or more.
The main driver of instrumentation cost.
Pricing
Published ranges, month to month, no lock-in
Agencies hide pricing because their number depends on what they think you can pay. Ours depends on scope. Here are the ranges, what sits inside each one, and the honest answer about when we are too expensive.
Month to month
no minimum term on any engagement, ever
Week 0
free readings before you commit a rupee or a dollar
Published
ranges, because a hidden price is a negotiation tactic
How we price
I
Scope, not perceived budget
The number comes from the size of your question panel, the state of your technical foundations, and how many gain assets a quarter you want built. It does not come from your funding round.
II
No minimum term
Everything is month to month. Long contracts exist to protect agencies from the consequences of mediocre work, and we would rather be renewable than contractual.
III
When we are the wrong choice
If you need volume publishing at the lowest possible cost per page, we are expensive and you should hire someone else. Our model only makes sense if information gain is worth something to you.
What Is Always Included
Nightly readings across five engines, the weekly shipping log, monthly scoring against pipeline, and any workflow we automate for you, documented and yours to keep.
There is no tier where you get a worse version of the instrumentation. The tiers differ in how much work we do, not how much truth you see.
Nightly panel
Shipping log
Owned workflows
The three shapes
Most clients start in the middle and move outward.
We build and run your prompt panel, benchmark you across five engines nightly, audit your technical foundations and score your existing library for information gain. You get the map, the instrument and a prioritised plan, and your own team executes it. Typically suits in-house teams who need direction and measurement, not hands.
Prompt panel built
Nightly readings
Technical audit
Gain scoring
Everything in Reading, plus execution: technical fixes, search architecture, the editorial engine, gain assets built to the rubric, entity and authority work, and the defence loop when a position slips. This is the standard engagement and where the compounding results on our case studies came from.
Technical execution
Editorial engine
Entity and authority
Defence loop
For brands going after an entire category rather than a set of questions: an expanded panel, original research published quarterly, programmatic scale where the data justifies it, digital PR, community presence, and the automations to run all of it. Deliberately limited, we take very few of these at a time.
Expanded panel
Quarterly research
Programmatic scale
PR and community
What moves the number
Four variables. Everything else is noise.
02
Variable
Technical debt
A clean modern stack needs weeks. A fifteen-year-old platform with four CMSs needs months before anything compounds.
Assessed in week one, priced honestly.
03
Variable
Gain assets per quarter
Original research is the expensive part, because collection is real work. One serious asset a quarter is the usual floor.
Also the highest-return line item.
04
Variable
Who writes
If you have in-house writers we brief them and the cost drops considerably. If we produce everything, it does not.
We prefer briefing your people.
Getting to a number
- 01 Free readings One week of nightly sampling on ten of your questions. No contract, and you keep the data. Week 0
- 02 Scoping call Panel size, technical state, who writes, what a quarter should produce. Week 1
- 03 A written proposal Fixed monthly number, what is in it, what is explicitly not, and the metric we will be judged on. Week 1
- 04 Start Month to month from day one. Thirty days notice, in either direction, no penalty. Week 2
- 05 Re-scope quarterly Up or down as the work changes. We have reduced our own fee when the technical phase ended. Quarterly
Next
Get a number in one call
Tell us your category, your stack and who writes for you. We can usually give you a range on the first call and a written proposal within the week.